E-Tix Tracking Market Grows

<B> E-Tix Tracking Market Grows</B>

By Sarah Welt

<I>Mt. Laurel, N.J.</I> - As travel agencies rush to develop and roll out automation products to track unused electronic tickets for their corporate customers, Travel One already has eight clients up and running on its E-Tron system.

Rolled out in January, the system has saved in the neighborhood of $500,000 for Travel One clients by locating and crediting back unused e-tickets, according to agency officials.

Jolane Queen, meeting and travel manager for Watson Wyatt & Co. in Washington, D.C., said E-Tron in the past four months has recovered $13,200 for the corporation. "Travel One introduced it, ran it for me, and recovered that much," Queen said.

Without the agency's intervention, she added, she would not have even thought of focusing on e-tickets, though 15 percent of Watson Wyatt's yearly transactions, or about 2,800 tickets a year, are processed electronically. Over a full year, "our breakage is a little lower than the industry average of 4.36 percent; we are running at 3.32 percent," Queen said. "That equates to 95 to 100 tickets a year, or about $50,000 worth."

Travel One data shows that since the beginning of the year, 4.36 percent of electronic tickets issued across its entire customer base have gone unused--a number the company translated into a potential loss of $261,450 for a company with $20 million in air volume. Client usage of e-tickets, meanwhile, is continually increasing, and is now in the 10 to 18 percent range.

The E-Tron system is the brainchild of Dan Marshall, Travel One's director of airline systems. According to Allan Brown, vice president of business systems, Marshall sold the company on his idea to track the tickets electronically as a way to add value for corporate customers in a fee-based environment. The agency does not charge an additional fee for use of the system.

E-Tron currently works through the Apollo CRS, though a Sabre version will be available in the next few weeks. The system creates a database that analyzes CRS data in order to locate unused segments. It also tracks non-refundable tickets, putting a notation in the traveler's record if a non-refundable ticket is still outstanding, so that it can be used for credit toward a future trip. Clients can create reports of unused e-tickets at the agency or view them online through their personal computers. Or, Travel One can run the reports and notify clients by e-mail, on disk or over the telephone, said vice president of sales and marketing Andrew McGraw.

Other companies and agencies--including BTI Hogg Robinson, American Express, Carlson Wagonlit and WorldTravel Partners (<I>BTN,</I> May 4)--likewise have been developing e-ticket tracking software. Among the independent software developers, Trondent Development Corp. of Barrington, Ill., earlier this year released a product called eTrak that can track unusued e-tickets by passenger name, record locator, date, flight number, airline and amount. President Lana Parro said the product was developed at the urging of a corporate client losing thousands of dollars on unused tickets.

An enhanced version, called eTrak Pro, even updates PNRs with details on unusued e-tickets, to alert reservationists to their existence at the point of sale.

ETrak obtains the e-ticket information by checking a table in a passenger record. Although e-tickets are assigned a ticket number, just like paper tickets, the actual ticket isn't issued until the time of boarding. The software searches e-ticket data by itinerary to determine which segments are past due, logging details of any segments for which a ticket hasn't been issued. E-ticket information remains active in the CRS for only 24 hours, but eTrak can be programmed to run automatically each day to track all tickets.

Trondent has released the software to run on Apollo and Sabre and is developing a version for Worldspan.